Ice Cream Festival Expands to Sun 'n Fun Grounds

Wednesday

Sep 11, 2013 at 11:57 PM

After being open for only a few hours earlier this year, the very first Florida Ice Cream Festival had already outgrown its venue.

By MATT REINSTETLETHE LEDGER

After being open for only a few hours earlier this year, the very first Florida Ice Cream Festival had already outgrown its venue. Festival organizer John Santarpia and the rest of his staff running the event expected about 5,000 to 8,000 people to attend, but an estimated crowd of 30,000 people flocked to Joker Marchant Stadium in Lakeland in April."Holy smokes, are you kidding me? When people lined up at 9 a.m. to get in at 10 a.m., it was the craziest thing," Santarpia said.The Florida Ice Cream Festival will move from Joker Marchant Stadium to the Sun 'n Fun Grounds at Lakeland Linder Airport. The event is also adding a second day and will be held April 12-13, a week after the Sun 'n Fun Fly-In.Next year's event will feature more ice cream vendors and the return of the World Ice Cream-Eating Championship featuring last year's winner Joey Chestnut, who won the event eating 11½ pints of ice cream in six minutes. April 13 will be Family and Church Day featuring local Christian rock bands. Santarpia, CEO of Magnify Credit Union, said this will allow people another chance to go if they couldn't make it Saturday.The first ice cream festival featured vendors selling ice cream with paper tickets similar to Pig Bucks at the Lakeland PigFest, also held at Joker Marchant Stadium.Santarpia attributes the huge turnout to heavy exposure in radio, TV and print media but says the best thing they did was distribute tickets through the Polk County school system, giving kids free admission. A portion of the proceeds went to the Magnify Life Foundation, which helps teach financial literacy to elementary school kids.Some guests at the first event criticized organizers for running out of ice cream early in the event, not expecting the size of the crowd."I think the second time around, knowing what we know now, obviously if we knew how many people would come we would not have run out (of ice cream) and had the problems that we had. I want to eliminate that, and we did with the Sun 'n Fun grounds, which is the perfect venue for the capacity," Santarpia said.Aymee Good, event and facilities sales manager at Sun 'n Fun, said the facility is 180 acres and the ice cream festival will use about 80 percent of the grounds."It will be all over the place. With the amount of people they had last year, it will be taking over the facility," Good said.Santarpia said the facility at Sun 'n Fun was his first choice. He said he also considered the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa but preferred the event to stay in Polk County."We'll knock it dead again," he said.

[ Matt Reinstetle can be reached at matt.reinstetle@theledger.com or 802-7533. Follow Matt on Twitter @LedgerMatt. ]